Earth Song Jewelry

First, I want to say that working with the wining designer I chose (mcsanjose22) was great. He came up with original artwork and logo ideas. He obviously read my brief, took that into consideration and incorporated my ongoing feedback when submitting his logo designs. Communication with him was very clear and we worked well together. After choosing the winning design, he delivered exactly what I requested, in the file formats I needed. Everything was done quickly and efficiently. I have made him one of my favorite designers and would absolutely work with him again!
As for DesignContest.com in general…
I posted my detailed brief (as a PDF) and at first only a few people submitted ideas. BUT, as I started giving detailed feedback I noticed that more and more designers submitted ideas. There were designers that clearly looked at the brief and feedback I was giving to the previously submitted designs and created their own logo ideas, which was great. Of course, there ended up also being designers who obviously read nothing and submitted logos that were 100% off the mark. Those designers created a lot of wasted time for me, as I had to go through their designs anyway to reject them.
Clearly, DC is correct - if you are engaged and give good feedback, more designers will participate and you will get a lot more ideas. I ended up with 266 submittals - although that is a very inflated number, as many submittals were just for minor changes I requested in my feedback. So, I’d say I had maybe 1/3rd of that as original designs - so about 80… which is a LOT. I’d say I had 40-50 reasonable /good original designs in that 80.
The feedback process if very easy and it’s easy to look back at the comments you have given related to any specific design. I like that if you are commenting on design #1, but mention design #2 in that comment, DC will attach the comment to design #2 also and make it so you see images of both design #1 and #2 with that comment. It really helps that they do that.
In the end, I winnowed down to the top designs and eliminated the rest to clean up my dashboard. Surprisingly, I ended up liking designs that didn’t meet all of the things I had laid out in my brief! After seeing what I had described and then seeing alternatives that still fit my input, and testing out the designs with mock prints of my earring cards and business cards, it became clear that what I originally imagined was not the best design. So, it’s great to have designers submitting their take of logo ideas that incorporated the feel of what I described but gave new styles. It all worked out great in the end. Honestly, there were a number of really interesting original designs that would have worked if I didn’t need to fit specific parameters of printing on small earring cards and retail hang tags.
Overall, I’d say that if you take the time to write a good brief - give the idea of what you are looking for, your branding voice and how you will be using your logo - and then give pointed feedback, you will get a good number of original designs on DesignContest. Be SURE you have time set aside for the week of your contest to go through all the submittals and give useful feedback! It does take a chunk of your time - but the faster you can give feedback, the faster you will get new and revised logos.
A 5-star experience and I ended up with a 5-star designer!
Here are some changes I’d like to see on DesignContest.com ...
- DC needs a better chat function. After choosing the winning design, you can message back and forth with the designer. But, the DC messaging setup is not linear and makes it hard to scroll through and keep track of where you are in the discussion. They should just use a basic chat function instead of what they implemented.
- There should be a way to click a button to “ding” designers who just dump a lot of submittals when they have clearly read nothing and are just dumping what seems to be random ideas to see if one will stick. It caused a lot of wasted time for me. I’m sure those designers do the same on other contests, so there should be a way to get that feedback in to DesignContest so they can do something about those folks.
- On that note, there should also be a way to “ding” designers who are clearly ripping off other designs. That’s just not cool. At the closing days of my contest, I had a swell of designers submitting designs that essentially copied the design elements from the top rated logos I had. I do not respect that and would not pick a designer who does that. It’s fine to get ideas from top designs, but to basically copy the same elements is not right.
Thanks for reading,
Cynthia
Earth Song Jewelry